Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  Calhoun had had to be helped from the Chamber after his speech was read; it was expected that he would never return. But he had returned for Webster’s speech. Not seeing his old foe at first, Webster said he regretted his absence. Then another senator shouted: “He is here.” And near the conclusion of Webster’s speech, Calhoun engaged him in a brief, harsh exchange, at the end of which there was an exchange that was less harsh, as if Webster had suddenly realized that it might be the last they would ever have. The “honorable member” had as always refused to cloak his opinions in gentle phrases, Webster said. “He did avow his purpose openly, boldly and manfully; he did not disguise his conduct or his motives.”

  MR. CALHOUN. Never, never.

  MR. WEBSTER. What he means he is very apt to say.

  MR. CALHOUN. Always, always.

  MR. WEBSTER. And I honor him for it.

  Those were indeed the last words they ever exchanged. Calhoun’s health deteriorated rapidly. In his boardinghouse room, he said, “If I could have but one hour to speak in the Senate….” He died on March 31; his funeral was held in the Senate, of course.

  The great debate was to roll on among those desks all that year and the next: the great speeches coming one after another—Clay fighting for his compromise (despite his poor health he spoke seventy times during the debate), northerners opposing it because, as William Seward put it, slavery was forbidden by “a higher law than the Constitution.” Once Clay’s clashes with Benton grew so fierce that the Senate adjourned to give the tempers of the two old men time to cool. And there was at least one moment of greater drama still, when an enraged Benton left his desk and advanced on diminutive southern Senator Henry S. Foote of Mississippi during an especially angry exchange, and Foote drew a pistol; the old frontier brawler did not pause but continued striding toward him, shouting, “I have no pistols. Let him fire! Stand out of the way, and let the assassin fire!” until finally Senator Dickerson of New Jersey took the pistol out of Foote’s hand. When, after months of debate in the sweltering summer months, most of Clay’s plan was passed, the Union was preserved by what Peterson calls “a truly monumental legislative achievement.”

  Within two years of the Compromise of 1850, all of the Great Triumvirate would be dead; when, in 1859 the Senate, grown too numerous for its beautiful Chamber, moved to larger, but drab, quarters in the Capitol’s new north wing, Vice President John C. Breckinridge, in a final address in the Old Chamber, summed up its spirit by evoking “the mighty three, whose names and fame, associated in life, death has not been able to sever”—and by pointing to their desks: “There sat Calhoun, the Senator, inflexible, austere, oppressed…. This was Webster’s seat. His great efforts are associated with this Chamber, whose very air seems yet to vibrate beneath the strokes of his deep tones and mighty words. On the outer circle sat Clay….”

  In the end, of course, the triumvirate could be said to have failed. The Civil War came. Ironically, it was in the Senate, scene of the great—and for decades successful—efforts to preserve the Union, that the fuse was lit that did so much to blow it apart. In 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, to get a railroad built that would benefit his Illinois constituents, persuaded his Senate Committee on Territories to report out a southern-supported bill—the Kansas-Nebraska Act—that would in effect repeal not only the Compromise of 1850 but the Missouri Compromise as well by allowing the creation of a state—Kansas—under conditions that virtually guaranteed that it would be a slave state. Abolitionists assailed the measure; Douglas was to remark that he could travel all the way from Chicago to Washington by the light of his burning effigy. But southern senators saw the chance to force the nation to accept slavery on their terms or break up the Union; for forty years the Senate had been the center of compromise; now it was the center of conflict; “as was so often the case during those great nineteenth-century debates, it seemed as if the whole population of Washington sought admittance to the Senate galleries,” an historian was to write. It was from one of the Senate desks that Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, an uncompromising foe of slavery, struggled to rise when, two days after he passionately denounced the “Crime Against Kansas,” a South Carolina congressman entered the Chamber, came up behind him and struck him again and again on his head with a heavy cane, while another South Carolinian, with another cane, faced the other senators to keep them from intervening. It was under his desk that Sumner’s leg became so entangled that he could not rise as the blows rained on his head and blood began pouring from his wounds; after he finally wrenched himself free, it was among the desks that he reeled, “backwards and forwards,” until he fell. (Whereupon southern senators congratulated the assailant.) By the time, three years later, that Sumner was able to return to the Senate, attempts at compromise had ended, and the smoking ruins and the streams of American blood were almost at hand. But did the triumvirate really fail? The compromises fashioned by Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (and by other senators, too, Benton notable among them) might be said to have merely postponed the settlement of the slavery issue, merely postponed the terrible war. But another view is that perhaps nothing could have stopped that war from coming. And if that is the case, then the Senate’s compromises had bought the time that America needed. An infant Union was crumbling; the Senate’s compromises had held it together year after year, decade after decade, had held it together long enough—as if those compromises had been a great delaying action to give the infant time to grow strong enough to win the war and to endure. Writing of the last of the compromises—the Compromise of 1850—and of the senators who had created it, Senator Byrd was to say, “Perhaps the greatest credit we can give them is to note that the Civil War began in 1861 rather than in 1851; for, if the war had broken out during the 1850’s, when … public opinion in the North was still divided over the slavery issue, we might today be two nations rather than one.” During a period of about four decades—a period roughly coinciding with the years, 1819 to 1859, during which the Senate occupied its ideal stage—it played magnificently the role the Founding Fathers had written for it. Its compromises cooled seemingly uncoolable passions, and its resistance to “King Andrew” in the Bank War and James Polk in the Mexican—and in the Oregon dispute—made it the republican tribunate against aggressive executive power, the great bulwark of liberty and self-government against the possibility of executive tyranny, that the Founding Fathers had hoped it would be. And the Senate was more. As Peterson says,

  Beginning in comparative seclusion, with a vaguely patrician character, like the Senate in ancient Rome, … its debates at first secret and then for many years barely reported, the Senate had emerged from the shadow of the House of Representatives as the first place of legislative deliberation and leadership…. Whatever the cause of its rising prestige—the triumvirs who graced it, its smallness (only forty-eight members until 1836), its indirect election (which some thought ensured superior wisdom and made the Senate what it ought to be, a congress of ambassadors from sovereign states), perhaps even its superb acoustics under a low-vaulted dome … the Senate fulfilled the … ideal of a great deliberative body, at once solid and brilliant….

  Contrasting the Senate with the “vulgar demeanor” of the House of Representatives, de Tocqueville, after his tour of the United States in 1831, was to comment that “The Senate contains within a small space a large proportion of the celebrated men of America. Scarcely an individual is to be seen in it who has not had an active and illustrious career: the Senate is composed of eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note, whose arguments would do honor to the most remarkable parliamentary debates of Europe.” De Tocqueville was not the only foreign observer deeply impressed. The Victorian historian Sir Henry Maine said that the Senate was “the only thoroughly successful institution which has been established since the tide of modern democracy began to run.” Prime Minister William Gladstone called it “the most remarkable of all the inventions of modern politics.”

  ON J
ANUARY 21, 1861, Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis rose at his desk to end the forty-year Senate effort to preserve the Union by telling his northern colleagues, “It only remains for me to bid you a final adieu.” Then he and four other southerners strode out of the Chamber. In the next weeks all but one of the twenty-two southern senators followed suit, leaving the Senate as their states were leaving the Union. (Only Andrew Johnson of Tennessee elected to remain loyal.) Three months later, with a Confederate force on the south side of the Potomac menacing Washington and breastworks of iron plates braced on the Capitol’s porticoes, rifles were propped among the desks and soldiers sprawled in the red leather armchairs; the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, hurriedly summoned by the newly elected President Lincoln to defend Washington (thirty-one of the regiment had been wounded in a battle en route), was quartered in the Senate Chamber; one soldier angrily hacked at Jefferson Davis’ desk with his bayonet.

  Lincoln had insisted that construction on the Capitol go forward (“If people see the Capitol going on, it is a sign we intend the Union shall go on”), and all through the war the great dome continued to rise above Washington as if to symbolize the growth of a great new nation—and all through that war, in its new Chamber, a Senate freed at last by the departure of the southerners enacted laws that knit together a mighty continent, filled it with people, and educated those people—Acts that spurred the creation of a transcontinental railroad that bound at last the continent’s far Pacific shore to its Atlantic and made possible the development of its Great Plains; that encouraged its settlement by promising a family 160 acres of the public domain for its enterprise and courage in settling it; and that provided for the sale of public lands to fund the creation of colleges. The Pacific Railway Act of 1862; the Homestead Act of 1862; the Land Grant College Act of 1862—it became very clear as these passed the Senate how the South had for so long shackled the Union.

  AFTER THE WAR, among those desks in the new Senate Chamber, there was another moment of glory—as phrases in the Constitution (“When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside …”) came to life. Four years of struggle between a Congress dominated by Radical Republicans determined to solidify the equality of races and humble the Confederacy and a President more interested in reconciliation than in revenge—four years in which legislation, of doubtful constitutionality, was passed (over Andrew Johnson’s vetoes) forbidding the President to remove federal officials, or to interfere with General Ulysses S. Grant’s command of the army without the Senate’s consent—was ended when the House, under the leadership of Representative Thaddeus Stevens (“Andrew Johnson must learn … that as Congress shall order he must obey”), voted by an overwhelming margin to impeach the President, and send the articles of impeachment to the Senate for trial.

  On that trial hung great issues. “Johnson’s opponents wanted to save a Reconstruction based on racial justice,” an historian says. “But his supporters had an honorable motive too. They wanted to save the presidency.” At first, conviction seemed all but certain, so overwhelmingly did public opinion in the North demand it. As one observer wrote on the eve of the trial, “The condition of the public mind was not unlike that preceding a great battle. The dominant part of the nation seemed to occupy the position of public prosecutor, and it was scarcely in the mood to brook delay for trial or to hear defense. Washington … swarmed with representatives of every state of the Union, demanding in a practically united voice the deposition of the President.” Representative Stevens had coldly warned both houses: “Let me see the recreant who would vote to let such a criminal escape. Point me to one who will do it and I will show you one who will dare the infamy of posterity.” And the House of Representatives had taken the warning: every Republican had voted for impeachment. In the Senate, with the eleven Confederate states still excluded, there were only fifty-four senators. Thirty-six votes were therefore required for conviction—and forty-two senators were Republicans. As the trial opened with Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding and administering to each senator, as he rose at his desk, an oath “to do impartial justice,” Benjamin Wade, president pro tempore of the Senate and therefore next in line for the Presidency, was confident that he would soon be in the White House.

  One of the Republicans, however, was Lyman Trumbull of Illinois. Trumbull hated Johnson, and hated Johnson’s stand on Reconstruction; he was, in fact, the author of much of the Reconstruction legislation that the President had vetoed. But now Trumbull said:

  The question to be decided is not whether Andrew Johnson is a proper person to fill the Presidential Office, nor whether it is fit that he should remain in it…. Once set, the example of impeaching a President for what, when the excitement of the hour having subsided, will be regarded as insufficient cause, no future President will be safe…. What then becomes of the checks and balances of the Constitution? … I cannot be an instrument to produce such a result.

  Another Republican was William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, known for his “reverence” for the Constitution, and for his independence. “His level gaze, high-bridged nose, and firm lips and chin identified a man who would be intimidated by none,” an historian wrote. Like Trumbull, Fessenden despised Johnson—not long before, he had said of the President: “He has broken the faith, betrayed his trust and must sink from detestation to contempt”—but none of those crimes were among those enumerated in the Constitution to justify impeachment, and now Fessenden wrote a friend that while “The country has so bad an opinion of the President, which he fully deserves, that it expects his condemnation…. I will not decide the question against my own judgment…. Make up your mind, if need be, to hear me denounced a traitor and perhaps hanged in effigy. The public, when roused and excited by passions and prejudices, is little better than a wild beast.”

  When it became known that seven Republican senators might be planning to vote against impeachment—the exact number necessary to prevent conviction of the President—the GOP was convulsed by rage. The seven were deluged by what the Philadelphia Press called “a fearful avalanche of telegrams from every section of the country,” representing “a great surge of public opinion.” In Illinois, where for decades Trumbull had been a revered public figure, a Republican convention resolved that “any senator elected by … Republicans, who at this time blenches and betrays, is infamous and should be dishonored and execrated.” James W. Grimes of Iowa was also refusing to go along with impeachment. So vicious were the abuse he was exposed to and the physical threats against him that they were blamed for a stroke he suffered two days before the vote was to be taken on the first article of impeachment. It was expected that he would not be able to attend the vote—or, as one chronicler sneered, “would plead that his illness prevented him from attending to cast the vote that would end his career”—and that the absence of his vote might give victory to the impeachers. On the day of the vote, however, the doors in the rear of the Chamber opened, and four men appeared, carrying Grimes to his seat. (Fessenden grasped his hand and gave him a smile.) Although senators stood to cast their impeachment votes, the Chief Justice said Grimes could vote while sitting, but when his name was reached in the balloting, he struggled to his feet, to say “Not guilty.” The Chief Justice asked each senator individually, “Mr. Senator, how say you?” and seven Republicans voted not guilty, making the vote 35 to 19, one vote short of the necessary two-thirds. Immense pressure was then put on every Republican to vote guilty on the other ten articles. But on each vote, at least seven rose among the desks of the Senate and said “Not guilty.” Sixty-four years before, in the trial of Samuel Chase, the Senate had saved the judiciary. Now it saved the presidency.

  In political terms, their “not guilty” votes cost the seven senators dearly. The fate Fessenden had foreseen for himself came true for all of them. All were denounced as traitors, not merely to their party but to their country (“We have had Benedict Arnold, Jefferson Davis, and now we have James W. Grimes,” Horace Greeley sneered in the New Y
ork Tribune), all were hung in effigy, and all were renounced by the party organizations of their respective states; not one of them was re-elected. But there were other terms. Shortly before he died, Grimes told a friend, “I shall ever thank God that in that troubled hour of trial, when many privately confessed that they had sacrificed their judgment and their conscience at the behests of party newspapers and party hate, I had the courage to be true to my oath and my conscience.” And he remembered Fessenden’s smile. “I would not today exchange that recollection for the highest distinction of life.” And in broader terms, the votes of those seven senators preserved the constitutional principle of the separation of powers. The removal of a President by Congress solely because of a dispute over policy could have transformed the entire American political system.

  The “excitement of the hour”—the “great surge of public opinion”—had demanded a President’s head. But only one house of Congress had bowed to that demand. The other had not. The Founding Fathers had created the Senate to stand against the “excitement of the hour.”

  Once again, the Senate had stood.

  BUT THAT MOMENT of glory was only a moment. After the Civil War, the Senate’s Golden Age was over, and the institution began to turn into the Senate that Lyndon Johnson was to find when he arrived in it more than three quarters of a century later.

  The Senate’s power wasn’t over—far from it. Reconstruction was crafted not in the White House but on Capitol Hill. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 became law and the Freedmen’s Bureau a fact over presidential vetoes. It was Congress, not the President, that divided the South into military districts as if it had been conquered Gaul and placed over each district a commander with powers as broad as those of a Roman proconsul. And although Reconstruction policy was created by the Senate in tandem with the House of Representatives, and on the Joint House-Senate Committee the dominant figure was Representative Stevens, during the period after Reconstruction, beginning with the inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant as President in March, 1869, the power of the House declined, and the power of the Senate grew, and grew again.